Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @10:10AM
from the die-schnippets-sind-aber-teuer! dept.

judgecorp writes "The German government has announced plans for a copyright law which would require Google, other search engines, and aggregators to pay for small snippets of text displayed on their pages. Journalistic citations and private users will be exempt."

So? Google is not under an actual legal obligation to index or describe any site hosted in Germany (or anywhere else). The enormous majority of people outside Germany wouldn't care if their sites vanished from the face of the earth. The simplest technical response to such a law would therefore be for search engines to not return any matches at all for German sites (and to not provide any results at all to people in Germany). Very simple to implement. Complies with the law.

Also totally not what the legislator had in mind, but who cares about what passes for thought in his or her neck of the woods?

Google is not required to do business in any single country.Google can not be touched if it just pulls everything out of Germany then de lists all German sites and shuts down its.gr domain.What are they going to do? Demand that Google do business in Germany?Fuck em.

Google is not required to do business in any single country.Google can not be touched if it just pulls everything out of Germany then de lists all German sites and shuts down its.gr domain.What are they going to do? Demand that Google do business in Germany?Fuck em.

It's just the single biggest economy in europe, if they want to pull out, they'd probably lose money in the end and leave a profitable market to the competition. Also, shutting down the.gr domain is surely going to affect a lot of german users:-)

The only reason I can think that they'd pull out is if the payments and the work needed to track what needs to be paid makes it unprofitable. At the point where Google can't make it profitable with their established and wide-scale infrastructure, I have doubts a smaller competitor will be able to make it profitable, and it may be that Germany will just be SOL.

Dealing with the Romans after they copied their entire culture and then molested it.
Dealing with the crusaders who pillaged and burned anything along their path to the ME.
Dealing with a Muslim occupation for 400 years without losing their identity.
Dealing with a foreign imposed Bavarian then Danish King they didn't ask for.
Dealing with a Civil War started by the British to force Greece to take back said Kingdom.
Dealing with a Euro Dollar that no one in Greece other then the pro-Euro government actually

Leaving aside your assumption that Google can afford to do this more than Germany can (obviously both sides can, but I think Google would be the clear loser in pulling out of Germany), you're not answering the question that was asked.

The question was about Google refusing to service sites which insist that German law be enforced, implying that Google would still serve German sites that let them pass. I strongly suspect that would be illegal whether or not there's any antitrust concerns.

It possibly would not immediately hurt Google. However, surely some other search engine (Bing?) would step in, and with Google being unavailable, it would get all the traffic Google would have gotten.

Note that it is quite easy to comply without violating that law, and at the same time without paying anyone: Just offer the links, without text excerpts. Not as useful as with excerpts, but infinitely more useful than no search engine at all.

* update google.de site to return only the links and ads. Provide a banner stating why it is this way (or info bubble or something). Provide a means for site administrators to opt out (or would it be opt in?) to allow text blubs.

* Leave google.com alone. Tell Germany to block google.com if it wants to - that'd be their responsibility (I think).

The point is you do more harm by making your site shitty than by making it go away.

No German really wants a shitty Google. These laws are against the people. They are bullshit. Put there to protect "Big Copyright". Just because you can comply with them does not mean you should.Google SHOULD not comply with laws like this. They should rail against them. Use their power to make the world a little bit better. Because I am tired of it getting shittier.

* update google.de site to return only the links and ads. Provide a banner stating why it is this way (or info bubble or something). Provide a means for site administrators to opt out (or would it be opt in?) to allow text blubs.

You can only do that if the law makes provision for it. If there's no legal way to do it, then it's time to deploy the old tactic of conspicuously complying with the law with the biggest amount of "fuck you" possible. Aiming the tactics to cause maximum harm to the corporate backers of the bill is of course the best approach. (Before you ask, Google's not going to be special in this; I can't see any other search engine wanting to put up with this sort of thing either.)

* Leave google.com alone. Tell Germany to block google.com if it wants to - that'd be their responsibility (I think).

Google is not required to do business in any single country.Google can not be touched if it just pulls everything out of Germany then de lists all German sites and shuts down its.gr domain.What are they going to do? Demand that Google do business in Germany?Fuck em.

Why would they shut down their.gr (eece) servers?And not their.de (utchsland) servers?

I wonder. If there was an issue with a specific company, AND if Google was declared a monopoly, would not listing that company count as anticompetitive?

I truly can't see how that matters. Any law would have to apply to all search engines equally anyway, so the only safe thing for any of them to do would be to refuse to index German sites or provide search results to people and businesses in Germany. OK, depending on the detail of the law it might be possible to be a little less draconian than that (e.g., it might be possible to provide snippets of non-.de sites) but any search engine would still be in the same position as Google with respect to German law

It is a bit late to get it as a standard, but I would rather have had an opt-in instead of an opt-out.

You have always had the option of not putting material on a publicly accessible web server. Google does you a favor by indexing it for free so people can do a quick search and find it. They also make it very easy to opt-out. I'm not sure what this publicly available but "opt-in" concept you have would look like. Perhaps you could do a prototype which we could all go opt into after we hear about it ummmm ho

Wow. So you want Google to index your site so that the masses of the internet can see it. Then you want them to pay you for it? You also want them to pay you more if they send more people to you? Copyright does not give you the right to force me to use your stuff and pay you for it. If you do not want parts of your site to come up then do not let it be indexed.What you really want if for Google to index your site for you. Make it real easy for people to find your content and display nothing but the url?Are

I bet Google would not have no access to content. I will go so far as to say that content needs Google.If two sentences or a headline are all a person needs from your "news source" then I would say you have a shit "news source".Maybe content providers need to provide real content. Not just facts. Dig deeper. Give me history, context and a deeper view of the story.If your copyright is on "just the facts". News for you. Facts are not copyrightable. But I put the facts in 9 words. those exact words are copyrig

It requires needless software development. Instead of honoring robots.txt for sites that don't agree to be indexed, Google will either have to extend robots.txt to allow oppt in or alter their internal code with a list of what they will not index regardless of robots.txt. More cruft and potentially nonstandard extensions on the web is not a good thing. Or Google could just stop indexing any site with an IP addr in Germany.

It requires needless software development. Instead of honoring robots.txt for sites that don't agree to be indexed, Google will either have to extend robots.txt to allow oppt in or alter their internal code with a list of what they will not index regardless of robots.txt. More cruft and potentially nonstandard extensions on the web is not a good thing. Or Google could just stop indexing any site with an IP addr in Germany.

They could just not show the text snippets to users in Germany... I would think that would be the easiest answer for them and it would also mobilize German users to get the law fixed as it would be all search engines, not just Google.

And this is the most responsible action Google can take - it will have a positive influence on bad policy.

With BGP intelligence, you can figure out what servers are in Germany, but the trick will be how the German government defines what a 'German' website it. I doubt they'll go with the most technically astute definition.

It would lead to the interesting situation where the government wants to insist that a website not actually in Germany is 'entitled' to such payments and the site owners anxiously urging them to reconsider.

I take it you didn't use Google's/Bing's news search much, because otherwise you'd know they show 2-3 sentence blurbs, barely enough to find relevant articles. Yahoo news search shows somewhat longer snippets, but still shorter than, say, an average/. summary and still not enough to visit only search page.

This is just yet another attempt at legislation from people unaware of how Internet works and proud of it.

Here's a beauty:

The law would oblige Internet aggregators and search engines to pay publishers to display all or part of their articles, including snippets such as headlines embedded in search links, according to the CDU.

The German public cares a lot about privacy and security on the net. Germany also has copyright lobbies. They are trying to sneak this in as the former. As soon as the truth about it hits the media it will be ridiculed and dropped. Germany has a parliamentary system and it works ok (in comparison to some other systems I could name), a bill is being planned usually means a member bill and some of them are retarded, but they never come anywhere near becoming law.

I think cost is a major factor. I have no idea how they plan on enforcing search engines pay for content. I think it's a terrible idea if publishers are planning to expand their reader base.
Bloggers are exempt, so i wonder if a google snippet of a blog would be cause for a payment.

Ya, if anything the market has shifted the opposite direction, and you pay them to get your website featured prominently (however you want to define that specifically).

Search engines have no incentive to pay to link. As long as they can minimally link for free they will, and if they have to pay for everything they link, well that isn't going to happen is it, because then you'd have no search.

It's like demanding the phone company pay businesses for the right to list their name in the phonebook.

A couple of weeks ago there was a story here about some campground in spain getting screwed because a search for Alfaques or whatever it was produced a slew of images from some terrible accident near them 30 years ago. That happens because the people who publish those images have made sure their results are at the top of searches, with images in thumbnails, and they are bigger companies than the small little campground. The system can't work both directions at once, and I can't imagine it working with search providers having to pay for what they are currently paid for.

The announcement doesn't surprise me at all. Germany is retarded with copyrights and riddled with the copyright industry lobbyists, they make auctions now give a percentage of art sales into a fund to be distributed to the artist who made it. This even affects art that was sold before the law. All it did was spring up masses of organizations that claim to represent a list of artists to claim the money and then take their commission.

Not to mention that the people who invested into art suddenly lost a few % to these leeches.

Before anyone claims that's right or correct, should volunteer, when selling their house, to give a few % to the carpenter/bricklayers/plumbers/electricians/etc. who built it, into perpetuity. Or when their used car is sold, give a few percent to the manufacturer. Or used books on amazon. Etc.

An alas German article about the whole debate (including Pro and Contra position) can be found in the c't 17/10 (online http://heise.de/-1447608 [heise.de]). They also have a news article on the most recent development ( http://heise.de/-1447608 [heise.de] ) but that is not really anything new except that the government now started to make internal plans on how to realize such a law. Note that obviously Heise would profit from such a law but they are typically quite impartial.

It does have sort of an equivalent to that, in the form of a number of articles like "Every person shall have the right to (property|life|...)". That the state may not make a law that restricts these rights (unless otherwise authorized to do so by the constitution) is implied. I'm not sure which rights apply to corporations and to which extent.

This new law will probably be constitutional for the same reason patents and copyrights are. I'm not sure what this reason is since the constitution doesn't specifica

Gosh, doesn't that render illegal the round-up of suspected "illegal aliens" (they are persons, not necessarily "citizens"), as well as the "you must have government-issued identification papers to vote" ? Maybe we should all read this Constitution thing.

One other question -- under whose authority/jurisdiction will this be enforced? Will it only be applicable when the source article is hosted by a site that is based in Germany? What if they aren't based there, but they do have a physical office there?

The proposal is to found a collecting society. Only its members get paid. i.e. not every publisher, only the ones which can afford paying the fees to enter the society and/or which the society finds "worthy".

Oh, we have those here in Portugal, one for authors and one for performers. At least the latter is a cesspool of corruption, trying as hard as they can to avoid paying their members, since they get to keep the money.

Hmmm... depending on the actual amount to pay, Google might actually like that (although it would certainly not publicly say so). While Google can afford some payment (as long as it is clearly below their revenue), the very same payment may be too high for a startup. In other words, it would keep competition away.

So, if I have a personal blog, Google can happily spread my content around all they like, for free. Okay, fair enough.
BUT, if I set up a private company to run my blog for me, and Google use content from THAT, they'd have to pay me?
Am I right in interpreting it like that? Or do they only mean *certain* businesses can get money for it? If it's that, get it tae fuck entirely

Good luck with that. Seriously. Next you'll tell me I have to pay to utter phrases that were already exclaimed! Sign me up! Just another way to paint themselves "victim" and get some simpathy browny points. Assholes.

The way I see it is that this is a direct cost of business that Google must recover. The snippet really is an advertisement of the article they are pointing to. That snippet is what the user uses to make the decision to click the link.

If the publisher wants that snippet shown, Google can charge them a nice monthly fee for advertising the article. Or they can opt out and have their article shown without the snippet or not at all.

Of course, Google is going to have to hire many new people to manage this a